Useful Photoshop Techniques, Tutorials and Tools

Quick Summary

As web designers, we always have something new to learn. Over the last decade our workflow has changed dramatically — it’s become more sophisticated and highly diversified. Not only do we have a much larger variety of improved tools to use; there’s also an endless stream of new techniques emerging and spreading within the web design community via social networks. And this is where the opportunity to learn new useful, practical approaches and techniques comes in.
We can learn by exploring the different design approaches other designers have taken, when solving their problems and apply these approaches to our work to become more productive and skilled. Therefore, our editorial team is permanently looking for interesting techniques, tools and tutorials, which we carefully select and present in round-ups on Smashing Magazine. You needn’t love our lists, but they often will give you some useful ideas and advice.
Below you’ll find an overview of new useful Adobe Photoshop techniques and tutorials that we’ve found and collected over the last months. We sincerely hope that at least some of the techniques presented there will help you improve your graphic design skills in Adobe Photoshop. And sincere thanks to all designers and developers whose articles are featured in this review. We respect and appreciate your contributions to the design community, folks!

Table of Contents

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As web designers, we always have something new to learn. Over the last decade our workflow has changed dramatically — it’s become more sophisticated and highly diversified. Not only do we have a much larger variety of improved tools to use; there’s also an endless stream of new techniques emerging and spreading within the web design community via social networks. [Updated June/14/2017]

And this is where the opportunity to learn new useful, practical approaches and techniques comes in. We can learn by exploring the different design approaches other designers have taken, when solving their problems and apply these approaches to our work to become more productive and skilled. Therefore, our editorial team is permanently looking for interesting techniques, tools and tutorials, which we carefully select and present in round-ups on Smashing Magazine. You needn’t love our lists, but they often will give you some useful ideas and advice.

Further Reading on SmashingMag:

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Below you’ll find an overview of new useful Adobe Photoshop techniques and tutorials that we’ve found and collected over the last months. We sincerely hope that at least some of the techniques presented there will help you improve your graphic design skills in Photoshop. And sincere thanks to all designers and developers whose articles are featured in this review. We respect and appreciate your contributions to the design community, folks!

Photoshop Techniques and Tutorials

Illustration

Make a Delicious Donut in Photoshop
In this tutorial, you`ll see the process of making a tasty donut in Photoshop. Use the pen tool, the brush tool, the burn tool, the dodge tool, the smudge tool, and various filters and layer styling techniques to achieve the final outcome.

Learn how to design some amazing vector based Retro Rainbow Curves using Adobe Photoshop. These retro artifacts have become a popular trend in modern design.

Blood and Milk Typography Poster in Photoshop
This tutorial shows you how easy with few basics steps you can create original typography poster in Photoshop. With this technique you can create interesting flyers for clubs or you can use it in advertisements.

How to Create an Amazing Mixed Media Poster in Photoshop
Learn how to create this creative composition using a variety of graphical elements. This tutorial will show you how to easily create futuristic shapes with the Path tools and combine them with photos and brushes to create this mixed media poster.

How To Design a 3D Wooden Box in Photoshop
In this tutorial, you’ll learn to make a Wooden Box with a realistic touch. Along the way, you will be learning various tips such as using layer-sets for putting a group of layers together that you’d want to move/resize alt at a time. With layer-sets, the tedious work of selection of multiple layers for moving/resizing can be avoided.

Brushing Up On Photoshop’s Brush Tool
Developing Photoshop brush skills takes time, but it is well worth the effort. This article outlines the plethora of options that Photoshop affords, so that you can efficiently create and use brushes like the Old Masters.

Master Repeating Patterns in Photoshop
Ths tutorial explains how a repeating pattern can be created given that there are spaces around the original shape. In the process, you will get a grasp on creating repeating patterns in Photoshop.

How to Create a Photo Realistic Camera
This article demonstrates a powerful combination of vector shapes, layer styles, and manual drawing to create a photorealistic camera. In fact, the result is so realistic that you’d think it’s just an ordinary photo.

Making a Book of Magical Playground Scene
This tutorial will show how to create a fantasy book scene. The designers will be using various advanced Photoshop techniques to make the composition as realistic as possible.

Opacity + Photoshop Blend Modes = Pattern Magic
When it comes to creating patterns, the ability to duplicate a layer is one of Photoshop’s greatest features.The trick is to pay attention more to how shapes interact than to how a shape looks on its own. This article explains this and other techniques for creating patterns in Photoshop.

Create a Photo Realistic USB Cable in Photoshop
In the right hands, Photoshop’s pen tool can be a very powerful tool for creating incredible; even photo realistic images. This tutorial demonstrates exactly that, and shows how to draw a photo realistic USB cable in Photoshop.

With Photoshop manipulation tools, you can create and edit images for Web and print. Below you will find some tutorials on poster design from 2010.

The 15 best free Photoshop Scripts
Photoshop is well known for its support for filters and actions, but there’s a third way to increase the functionality of Adobe’s image editing tool: scripts.

Photoshop Etiquette For Responsive Web Design
Style Tiles, Style Prototypes, Visual Inventories, Element Collages, style guides, and even designing in the browser have all been suitable approaches to multi-device design. With a shift from page-based design to building a design system, it’s truly an exciting time.

Is your pattern library up to date today? Alla Kholmatova has just finished a fully fledged book on Design Systems and how to get them right. With common traps, gotchas and the lessons she learned. Hardcover, eBook. Just sayin'.

Understanding Inner Shadows in Photoshop
Photoshop layer styles are a popular way to add effects, such as drop shadows and strokes, to layers in a non-destructive way. With the right knowledge and experience, any effect can be achieved. To achieve these effects, however, you need to understand what each setting does and how they can be combined to achieve a certain look.

3D Water Text Effect with Repoussé in Photoshop CS5
In this tutorial you’ll see how to create a water text effect with Photoshop. Even though it might look complex, it’s a very simple effect. You will be using the new Repoussé tool and then some stock photos to create the effect.

Create a Distressed Vector Typographic Poster Design
Follow this step by step walkthrough of Chris Spooner’s recent design process for the ‘Spectrum’ poster. Starting with custom made type in Illustrator, you’ll move vector graphics into Photoshop for some serious distressing with Photoshop brushes and blending modes.

How to Make a Photoshop Montage
Anyone can cobble together a few photos and textures and create a humdrum montage. To elevate yours beyond this it takes a few simple tricks using Photoshop’s array of tools. This tutorial explains how to create a Photoshop montage in 19 steps.

Improving General Photoshop Skills

Create Animations in Photoshop
After Effects is the go-to Adobe application for creating both simple and complex animations. However, for those users that either don’t have the time to learn an entire new application or simply don’t own a copy of After Effects, Photoshop has incorporated very similar, albeit scaled back, functionality.

Learn Photoshop: All of the Basics for Beginners
This post is intended for designers or aspiring designers who either want to get started with Photoshop or have limited experience and are looking to improve. With this post you’ll find links to plenty of resources to teach you all the basics and fundmentals of Photoshop.

Templates

Photoshop Android GUI Set, Great freebie.
This design pieces are brought to you thanks to our design family at Iconshock, which is a quote of faith regarding the quality of the set. The package includes fully editable Photoshop files, original fonts and previews, everything that you may need in order to customize your set according to your preferences. Please let us know your opinions and feel free to share this amazing gift with your friends, remember that you will always find the best articles and resources only here, at Webdesignshock.

60 High Quality Photoshop PSD Files For Designers
Photoshop .PSD file reveals the techniques used on a specific design, and it also tells us the style of the creator and most of the time there is something new we can learn from it. You’ll get quite an overview of interesting techniques in this collection of PSD files.

Modern UI and Layout Tutorials for Photoshop
In this round-up you’ll find many current web design Photoshop tutorials that cover not only web page layouts, but also web app layouts, mobile UI and design elements such as buttons, search boxes, headers and footers.

How to Effectively Organize your Photoshop Layers
This tutorial outlines how to create organized, designer and developer friendly PSD files. This is in no way the only solution, but hopefully it will encourage better practice in the web design world.

Coding, Processes and Organization

Preparing Photoshop Files for Web Developers
Designers can help their counterparts or clients before a design hand-off by taking 10 to 15 minutes to prepare files in a consistent and organized manner that can potentially save developers hours of production time. As an added bonus, an organized Photoshop file will save designers time by minimizing development questions after the file has been handed off for coding.

Divine
Divine creates websites from Photoshop to Wordpress promptly. Basically, Divine is a plug-in that sits on top of Photoshop. Once you’ve finished designing in Photoshop, launch Divine plug-in in Photoshop, assign WordPress roles to the main elements (e.g. #footer, #header, etc.), and then the plug-in will prepare all the files you need. Once you set FTP access, the tool uploads the theme automatically to your server. The tool is free.

Open With Photoshop
Open With Photoshop is a Firefox extension that allows you to send any image via right click context menu from the browser directly to the Photoshop.

Last Click

Why We Don’t Deliver Photoshop Files
Occasionally a potential client will ask you to give them Photoshop comps as the final deliverable, to be coded either by an internal implementation team or a technical partner. Some designers don’t do that. Here’s why.

If Photoshop Was Batman, Then Illustrator Would Be…
From the article: “Perhaps as a direct result of too much Batman: Arkham Asylum, I found myself asking the question: If Photoshop was Batman, what would Illustrator be? In this silly little article, I explore some of the intriguing possibilities.”

Top 10 Photoshop Feature Requests
This post presentes some of the top 10 most requested features that he believes would make Photoshop a more powerful and time saving tool.

Photoshop CS6 wish list
You may want to check out this Photoshop CS6 wish list, too. Do you agree with the features mentioned there?

The Darwinian Evolution of Photoshop
What does a top notch graphic designer have in common with an amateur photographer who uploads his weekend pictures on Facebook? They both love Photoshop! This infographics presents the evolution of Photoshop in a quite unusual, original way.